Paul Klee (1879–1940) may have protested that “we are much too concerned with biography in art,” but this revealing exhibition shows that even the most imaginative artist can’t escape the influence of his own life and times. The show is organized into eight thematic sections, tracing “the artist’s dialogue with nature,” “the drama of existence,” and “movement, flight, and the balance of forces,” as Klee explored them over the decades.
In the satirical etching Comedian (1904), a rumpled-faced actor in a plumed helmet sports a mask that looks much like his own face. Klee, an accomplished violinist and music critic, was also an avid operagoer who considered opera the highest form of theater. This grotesque buffo character presents a maddeningly inconclusive image, but we can still delight in its expressionism and the energy of its pulsating lines.
Klee’s technique becomes more diffuse in the etching Small World (1914). Peering closely at the lines, shapes, and blobs, one can make out a mask, stick figures, and the year and number of the work drawn in the plate. The energy that Klee has invested in working the plate and the thicket of jittery imagery reinforces Marcel Franciscono’s contention that Klee’s “basic impulse was graphic.”
This undisciplined world gives way to City of Cathedrals(1927), a drawing of such restraint that it moved even Michel Foucault to an unexpected moment of clarity: “In order to deploy his plastic signs, Klee wove a new space.” This childlike work is deceptively